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The effect of their local community on the decisions that people make, so that they may be influenced by the views of others in the community; ‘converted’, in other words, by their neighbours. Mondak in D. C. Mutz et al., eds. (1996) reports that some contextual effects emerge when citizens use their local environment as a default source of information in the absence of national information. Cutler (2007) Pol. Geog. 26, 5 thinks that local conditions will be more influential on issues that are: clearly related to a particular political judgement; easy to observe; with localized policy impacts; and where national-level information is scant or open to multiple interpretations. Pearce et al. (2008) J. Epidemiol. & Comm. Health 62 study the contextual effect on diet. See also embeddedness.